1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to the field of delivering content to multiple requesters over a communications network. The invention particularly relates to efficient communication of responses to requests for content being processed by a web content server.
2. Description of Related Art
In a networked environment, a content server responds to requests for content from networked devices by sending responses to the networked devices. The responses comprise one or more packets of information that deliver the requested content to the requesting networked devices.
Over a time interval, many requesting networked devices can request the same content from the content server. For example, browsers on many networked personal computers may request download of a particular web page from a web site. In prior art web server systems, for example, 1000 requests for a particular web page may be received by a web server, and consequently 1000 responses with the same web page content will be sent out into the network destined for reception by the 1000 requesting networked devices. Unfortunately, this additional traffic for the same content consumes significant additional network bandwidth at many key distribution links across the network. Regrettably, this reduces overall network efficiency and detrimentally impacts the performance of an overall web server system. A main disadvantage with the prior art systems, therefore, is that a content server individually processes and responds to received requests one at a time even if these requests are for the same content.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.